Brian Williams - Predators

It later emerged that Shahzad, who was a Pakistani American, had been trained in a terrorist training camp in Waziristan of the very sort the CIA drones had been attacking. Shahzad claimed to have been in the region at the time of CIA drone attacks and to have known people who were killed in drone strikes. 26During his court trial Shahzad was questioned by Judge Miriam Cedarbaum. Following is an account of that questioning that shows how the drone strikes motivated him:

“You wanted to injure a lot of people,” said Cedarbaum. Shahzad said the judge needed to understand his role. “I consider myself a Muslim soldier,” he said. When Cedarbaum asked whether he considered the people in Times Square to be innocent, he said they had elected the U.S. government.

“Even children?” said Cedarbaum.

“When the drones hit, they don’t see children,” answered Shahzad. He then said, “I am part of the answer to the U.S. killing the Muslim people.” 27

Shahzad also proclaimed his desire to avenge “those innocent people being hit by drones from above.” 28He subsequently responded to the question of whether he wanted to plead guilty by saying, “I want to plead guilty, and I’m going to plead guilty 100 times over. Because until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan, and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims, and stops reporting the Muslims to its government, we will be attacking U.S., and I plead guilty to that.” 29

The Pakistani Taliban subsequently claimed responsibility for Shahzad’s failed terrorist attack, their second attempted bombing outside of the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater (the first being an attempt in Spain). In a video statement the Pakistani Taliban said it was revenge for the “recent rain of drone attacks in the tribal areas.” 30A Taliban commander said of the attempted terrorist attack, “We were expecting this. They were desperately looking for revenge against America inside America.” 31An American intelligence official concurred and said, “Those [drone] attacks have made it personal for the Pakistani Taliban—so it’s no wonder they are beginning to think about how they can strike back at targets here.” 32

Although Hakimullah Mehsud failed in his effort to avenge the death of his predecessor, Baitullah, on this occasion, he succeeded in another attempt: the infamous Camp Chapman bombing, an account of which reads like a story in a spy novel. (It was actually featured in the Hollywood blockbuster Zero Dark Thirty .) The Camp Chapman bombing actually has its origins in Jordan, where police had arrested a Jordanian doctor named Hamam al Balawi, who had been involved with extremist groups. The Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate turned Balawi and made him a double agent. Convinced that he was now working for them against the terrorists, the Jordanians offered him to their American allies. Their hope was that Balawi would travel to Waziristan and offer his services to al Qaeda. After being accepted, he could then reveal Ayman al Zawahiri’s location to the CIA, which could dispatch him with a drone.

Balawi began to work secretly for a CIA drone intelligence team based in Forward Operating Base Camp Chapman in the Afghan border province of Khost. There this “superstar asset” appeared to gain the trust of the CIA team handling him, so much so that he was once allowed on the base without being frisked. This lack of vigilance cost the CIA heavily on December 30, 2009. As Balawi arrived on the base, he was surrounded by CIA officers and contractors. When one of them belatedly went to pat him down, Balawi triggered a bomb hidden on his body and killed everyone around him, including the CIA station chief, a forty-five-year-old mother of three; two officers involved in the CIA Counterterrorism Center’s drone-targeting program; two contractors for Xe/Blackwater; one Jordanian intelligence officer, who was a cousin of the Jordanian king; and one other person. Virtually the entire CIA drone team at Camp Chapman was wiped out by Balawi, who was actually a triple agent still working for the terrorists. Today a photo tribute to the slain agents hangs in the CIA Counterterrorism Center’s Pakistan Afghanistan Department at Langley. 33

After Balawi’s suicide, Pakistani Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, released a prerecorded videotape that featured images of him sitting next to Balawi as the suicide bomber posthumously promised to avenge the earlier drone assassination of Baitullah Mehsud. Balawi declared, “We will never forget the blood of our emir, Baitullah Mehsud. We will always demand revenge for him inside America and outside.” 34Balawi also said he was offered “millions of dollars” to “spy on mujahideen… but instead I came to them [the Taliban]… and I told them everything, and we arranged this attack so the Americans can understand that the belief of Allah…. This jihadi attack will be the first of the latest operations against the Americans and their drone teams outside the Pakistan border, after they killed the Emir of Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan Baitullah Mehsud.” 35

The Camp Chapman suicide attack was the second largest loss of CIA lives after the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983, which destroyed an entire CIA team. Revenge was not, however, long in coming. After the Khost bombing, an intelligence official promised, “Last week’s attack will be avenged. Some very bad people will eventually have a very bad day.” 36In the following weeks the CIA launched an unprecedented blitz of drone strikes on the territories of Mehsud and Haqqani, who was also thought to be involved in the Camp Chapman attack. Among those killed in the retaliatory strikes was Hussein al Yemeni, a top al Qaeda leader who was involved in the Camp Chapman plot. For all the CIA’s efforts to take out both Haqqani and Mehsud, to date neither of them has been killed and the real culprits behind the Camp Chapman attack have gone unpunished.

THE EXPOSURE OF THE PAKISTANI CIA STATION CHIEF’S IDENTITY

In 2010 a Pakistani journalist named Kareem Khan from Mir Ali, North Waziristan, filed a lawsuit against the CIA station chief in Pakistan, CIA director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Khan’s suit asked for a half million dollars in compensation for the killing of his brother and his son in a drone strike on December 31, 2009. Khan claimed, “That drone attack killed my son, my brother and a local man. We are not terrorists, we are common citizens.” 37

But that was not all. In his lawsuit Khan named the head of the CIA in Pakistan, Jonathan Banks, and blew his cover. Khan’s application to register the case stated, “Jonathan Banks is operating from the American Embassy in Islamabad, which is a clear violation of diplomatic norms and laws, as a foreign mission cannot be used for any criminal activity in a sovereign state.” 38Khan’s lawyer further stated, “Mr. Kareem maintains that Jonathan Banks is not a U.S. diplomat therefore he does not enjoy diplomatic immunity, and his involvement in the execution of his son and brother simply makes him a murderer who is to be taken to task.” 39He also called for Banks to be tried for murder and executed.

In response, the Islamabad Police Department moved to order a murder case against Banks. Within days Banks’s name was published in papers around the globe, and protestors in Pakistan were carrying placards with his name on them demanding his arrest. Banks was hurriedly smuggled out of Pakistan after he received numerous death threats.

Enraged American officials claimed that Khan, a simple Pashtun tribesman, could not have discovered the name of the CIA station chief in Pakistan if he had not been given details of his identity by the Pakistani ISI. 40As for the actual lawsuit itself, Khan has received no compensation money from the government to date, but his suit did achieve another purpose, namely, it embarrassed the CIA. The basis for Khan’s lawsuit—that he was an innocent tribesman whose loved ones were brutally killed in a drone strike—was, however, challenged when two intelligence officials told CNN that he had been housing a notorious Taliban commander named Haji Omar Khan at the time of the strike. 41Haji Omar Khan was said to have been killed in the drone strike.